2009 what a year?

I heard this recently and it got me thinking... what made 2008/2009 so remarkable?

I started my career in the early 90's, is was also a time of big changes. PC's were common place in the workplace and truly portable laptop computers were becoming standard issue to professionals (mine was a 386 sx with 2 MB of RAM). Information Technology was making its mark and the world was getting smaller. The mid 90's the Internet was becoming ubiquitous outside academia and the Dot Com boom was truly underway. The Asian crisis in 1997, the Russian crisis in 1998... I remember industry commentators saying that risk management would change forever. The turn of the millennium was a bit of an anti-climax with respect to the year 2000 bug. Then the Dot Com bust, followed by the telecoms bust followed by the rise of the hedge fund.

So was 2008/2009 and the global credit crisis so remarkable ..... in the context of the past 20 years I would say not really. it is more like a consistent trend, the volatility of the rate of change in our daily lives has gone wild. Today's option traders must must have nerves of steel! No longer can you make tomorrow's decisions based on yesterday's rules.